Redundancy in Acronyms?

It’s kind of amusing for a bunch of engineers to gather around and discuss grammar and spelling and other such literary things. As generally technical people, we tend to focus on writing things that are concise and meaningful to us as engineers rather than grammatically correct and understandable to someone unfamiliar with the technical details. But I tend to think – no, I know – I am more nitpicky about grammar and making written words look correct and be understandable not only to us but to other people, particularly management. Writing and proofreading isn’t something I despise (which should be quite evident to anyone reading this), but most engineers dislike that part of the job a lot.

 

Anyway, in a peer review of a fairly lengthy software change and test report, discussions about the technical facts and procedures were discussed very little but the English part of it was scrutinized. Yes, this was largely due to me complaining about sentence fragments, comma splices, bad subject-verb agreement, and general wording that would be unclear to the untrained eye (someone who is not an engineer who worked on the project in question).

 

One particular side discussion went on for awhile. One phase of the project is called SWIT (sometimes defined as Software Integration Testing and sometimes Software Integration Test) and another phase is called SIT (System Integration Testing, but likewise also has the –ing left off). Within each phase are a series of tests (maybe 100 in SWIT and 20 in SIT) that all have to pass before the phase is complete. The debate is when you are referring to one test in the series, is it a SWIT or is it a SWIT test? If we take SWIT to be a noun referring to the phase as a whole, then it should be a SWIT test. But if we expand the acronym it seems redundant to use the word test back to back. And calling it a SWIT makes sense, but then you get the confusion of having SWIT mean the phase as a whole and also meaning one part of said phase. From an engineering perspective, SWIT test is more understandable because it is not as ambiguous but from an English perspective, calling it a software integration test is perhaps more accurate. And that’s not even going into the fact that both acronyms (SIT and SWIT) are actually SIT. But I think any sane person would agree that they should not both be called SIT as that would be ridiculous. Maybe we should just get rid of acronyms and then the names of the test phases wouldn’t need “Testing” at the end. Software Integration would be a perfectly fine name and then a Software Integration test would clearly be one individual test within Software Integration.

 

I know I’ve seen this sort of redundancy other places but I can’t think of where.